Ukraine’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

By tradition, the Ukrainian political season begins the week after independence day—August 24. This year’s celebration was especially poignant, as it marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence.

What was the public’s mood on the eve of this silver anniversary? A survey conducted this August by SOCIS , one of Ukraine’s best known sociopolitical research and marketing companies, provides a rather striking answer.

The survey, which was conducted in Odessa, Ukraine’s third-largest city, suggests that over half of Odessans describe their city as “tense,” while nearly ten percent say it is “explosive.” But even more interesting is that Odessans view the situation in Ukraine overall as much worse, with over ninety percent describing it as either “tense” or “explosive”!

Lest readers think that Odessa is an anomaly, I should point out that these results do not differ substantively from surveys conducted in February or June 2016, which show a steady decline in public trust in government since the 2014 Maidan uprising.

How did things get so bad? Part of the fault certainly lies with the IMF’s austerity recommendations, which the vast majority of Ukrainians view as both harmful and pointless . But no downward spiral in public confidence could ever be so complete without the connivance of government officials. To put it bluntly, government policies have seemed, at times, almost intentionally designed to fuel public anger.

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A good example is the policy of actively curtailing Russian investment in Ukraine. While this has reduced Russia’s economic influence in the Ukrainian economy, as the government intended, in the absence of commensurate Western investment to replace what was lost, major industries have collapsed, and the country’s standard of living along with them. If the country continues on its present course, Odessa’s reformist governor Mikheil Saakashvili has noted sarcastically , Ukraine will not reach the level of GDP it had under former president Viktor Yanukovych for another fifteen years.

People might even be willing to view this as a necessary sacrifice in times of war, but for the fact that Ukrainian oligarchs often continue to line their own pockets by doing business in Russia. This includes President Petro Poroshenko himself, whose personal wealth increased sevenfold in 2015.

Another source of public frustration is the new quotas for the use of the Ukrainian language. According to the law signed on July 6, the percentage of total content in Ukrainian in radio and television programs must be raised to 60 percent. For some reason, special attention was paid to songs, of which 35 percent must be sung in Ukrainian during peak listening hours within three years. Broadcasters failing to comply will face a fine of 5 percent of their license fee.

Given the sheer size of the Russian-language market, Russian has always been preferred in the Ukrainian entertainment industry. Ukrainian nationalists see this as a problem, but instead of making the use of Ukrainian a more attractive choice by providing financial support for Ukrainian-language entertainment, the government has decided to punish the use of Russian—which, just a few years ago, was the language preferred by 83 percent in a Gallup survey. If the movie industry’s past experience is any guide, the results of this latest initiative will be a decline in domestic sales, a rise in bootlegged entertainment from Russia and no perceptible shift in people’s linguistic choices.

Finally, this summer the government decided to “de-Communize” local place names, often with undisguised contempt for the opinion of the local population. In the cities of Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro) and Kirovograd (now Kropyvnytskyi), surveys showed large majorities in those cities rejecting the government’s name choice and, if the name had to be changed, preferring the czarist-era names . The parliament rejected this option out of hand.

The current speaker of parliament, Andriy Parubiy, seemed genuinely outraged that local residents felt they should be consulted on the matter at all. Recounting how his grandmother used to tell him about the “Muscovite occupiers” who had killed millions in eastern Ukraine and then repopulated the region with others, he added: “And now you appeal to us on behalf of the local population? And now you appeal to us based on the opinion of the people who live there?” All eastern and southern Ukrainians were told, in effect, that their voices had no right to be heard in the national parliament, because they were, presumably, the descendants of “Muscovite occupiers.”

Parubiy later described de-Communization as the parliament’s main achievement this session, but in reality nothing has been settled. The parliament’s decision will be challenged in the courts for many years to come. Indeed, the most notable impact of the government’s ham-fisted efforts to reeducate its own citizens has been to relaunch the once discredited Opposition Bloc.

Meanwhile, bad economic news keeps piling up. In September, right around the time that the new session of parliament starts, people will be receiving their electricity bills, at a tariff rate that has just increased by 25 percent. This follows repeated hikes in utilities , which 80 percent of Ukrainians say they already cannot afford.